A quick update. I'm the only one here in the lab this whole week, so I've been busy dealing with chores more than anything (though I did end up with some time to clean up a couple coding projects).

After the regular outage we had a bit of a network freakout caused by our science backup again. I guess this is what happens when you speed up disk i/o to the point where reading from it is so fast that writing backups over the network without throttle causes NFS to barf. Oops. I thought we got over this, but apparently not. Sorry about that. This actually mostly affected the mysql database server carolyn even though the backup was happening from science database server paddym. In any case, outside of a temporary outage and some minor cleanup there really wasn't any harm. Oh yeah I guess the mysql replica server on oscar got confused during all that so it'll be offline until I can resync it during the next weekly outage on Tuesday.

The science database is actually bloated temporarily as one thing I'm working on this week is finally merging fractured tables. Over the years we hit various logical limits in our larger tables (workunit, gaussian, triplet) and had to split these tables into smaller pieces. Now with the power and disk space of paddym we can finally merge these tables back into one again. So while this process is happening in the background there are redundant versions of signals in multiple tables. Fair enough. We'll drop the fractured tables eventually.

I'm also working on getting a backup web server at the ready, namely jocelyn (the former mysql replica doing nothing now that oscar is the mysql replica). I'm not sure if high loads on the current web server are local, but in any case we have a mirror which we may employ at some point.

My tech news updates will become more staggered than usual as I'll be on the road playing rock star for 11-12 weeks before the end of the year. More info (if you are so inclined to care) is in a staff blog thread over here.

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

I used to have an RSS feed that showed only the Technical News. It seems to have been lost during the recent upgrade. The main SETI News RSS is working fine. Would it be possible to restore this sometime soon? Thanks!

I used to have an RSS feed that showed only the Technical News. It seems to have been lost during the recent upgrade. The main SETI News RSS is working fine. Would it be possible to restore this sometime soon? Thanks!

We at SETI@Netherlands would also like to have the RSS feed back please. We use it to inform our users about the tech news